


Our Most Brilliant Friends (Are Doubting Themselves)

by daisysusan



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Foursome - M/M/M/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:06:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daisysusan/pseuds/daisysusan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark, Eduardo, Chris, and Dustin find themselves suddenly lacking verbal filters, and realize they absolutely need to deal with the problem -- and there's only one way that they think they can fix things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Most Brilliant Friends (Are Doubting Themselves)

**Author's Note:**

> This is in response to a kinkmeme prompt requesting no verbal filters fic post-deposition. It's not my favorite of my stories, but I figured having it reposted here would be nice nonetheless.

Our Most Brilliant Friends (Are Doubting Themselves)

The first time it happens to Mark, he’s on the phone with his mother. (He’s glad it wasn’t a business meeting or something equally disastrous, though that might have been funnier.) She’s about to hang up and, as always, the last thing she says is “I love you.”

Only this time, instead of answering her with an inarticulate mumble or some variation of “me too,” the words that fall out of his mouth are “I love you, too.”

She doesn’t react audibly, doesn’t exclaim or ask him if he’s dying and this is going to be their last ever conversation, even when he follows it with an “Oh shit, why did I say that?” that descends into rambling: “It’s not that I don’t love you I just don’t like saying it but you know that, Mom …”

But there’s a minute change, a sharp intake of breath and her voice wavers the slightest bit as she says “Good night, Mark.”

So all in all, it wasn’t that bad. (He’ll find out later just how bad it could have been.)

\--

The first time it happens to Eduardo, he’s in a business meeting. He leans forward in his chair to make a note on his computer—namely, _this is a freaking terrible idea and we absolutely should not fund it_ —and finds everyone staring at him.

Next to him, a co-worker starts speaking frantically. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Jamison,” she says, “Mr. Saverin is working two accounts right now, and he accidentally mentioned the other, which really is a terrible idea.”

It’s an atrocious lie, and the client doesn’t buy it even for a second.

The next time Eduardo opens his mouth, he starts describing the reasons the proposition is a terrible one, and quickly excuses himself.

 _Shit_ , he thinks (and says) as he stands in the hall outside the conference room, _that went badly_.

\--

The first time it happens to Chris, he’s on a date. It is the _worst thing ever_.

His date, who is nice, smart, interesting, and passably funny, makes a joke that falls the tiniest bit flat (okay, it falls mostly flat, but there was a sound premise for a joke under there somewhere).

And, instead of laughing politely and letting the conversation move on, Chris hears himself say “Dustin could’ve made that funnier.”

He immediately claps his hands over his mouth and tries to backtrack. “Oh god, David, I am _so sorry_. I didn’t mean that at all, Christ.”

David looks at him like he’s not sure what to make of the situation (and, in all honesty, Chris isn’t sure what to make of the situation), but seems to believe him. Or rather, David believes him until Chris opens his mouth again, at which point he said rather a lot about Dustin’s sense of humor and how much he enjoyed it, even when it was inappropriate and poorly timed.

It is legitimately the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to him, even though David is very polite and kindly suggests talking to Dustin, because Chris prides himself on keeping his emotions (and mouth) under control. He has Mark and Dustin to cause him trouble by babbling aimlessly.

\--

When it first happens to Dustin, he's on the phone with Mark.

Mark is flipping his shit about something that doesn't entirely make sense; apparently he's started saying everything he thinks. Dustin was pretty sure he already did that, so the conversation is all very surreal.

"Mark," he says, "You're such a dick that you already say everything you think. This conversation is very surreal."

He pauses briefly and then adds, "Why did I say that?"

"Shit," Mark replies. "I think you're doing it too. The stream-of-consciousness thing."

"You mean like saying everything I think? That is so weird." Dustin buries his head in his hands and mumbles, "I have a lot of thoughts I don't want to say out loud, like how I really want to bone Chris sometimes. Fuck, I just said that out loud. You can forget that now if you want to."

"I wish I could," Mark says weakly. "But I'm definitely never going to and I'll probably repeat it at an embarrassing moment, like in front of Chris."

“Why is this happening?” Dustin thinks.

He does a double-take on his phone when Mark answers. “Hell if I know. Do you think it’s just us?”

There’s a pause during which Dustin’s mind goes completely blank, and then he (naturally) suggests the first thing to jump into his stunned brain.

“We should get shit-faced.”

 

\----------

 

Chris slams his hand down on his nightstand. The noise doesn't stop. He tries a few more times until it finally does.

Except it starts again moments later.

"That's my phone," he says, voice low and hoarse, then "Fuck, I'm still saying everything." Into the phone, he says "Why are you calling me? I want to be asleep."

"Sorry, dude," comes through the phone in Dustin's voice. "It's just that Mark and I can't stop saying everything we're thinking and it's really fucked up. Your voice sounds nice like that."

"I'm going to ignore that, Dustin, because I'm trying not to think about you," Chris replies.

"Whatever. I'm too freaked out to deal with your repression."

"I'm only—" Chris buries his head in the pillow, successfully muffling the rest of the sentence. "I'm only repressing because I don't want to lose my best friend." At normal volume, he says, "I want out of this conversation. Just put Mark on?"

"I'd rather talk to you," Dustin whines.

Chris thinks hard, he thinks so very hard, but he manages to say "I just want to talk to Mark, Dustin." Of course, he promptly follows it with, "I had to focus really hard to say that."

"Hi Chris," Mark slurs into his ear. "I'm drunk. I had a drink every time I told Dustin something nice. Or mean. Basically I had a drink every time I talked. I'm talking now. I should have another drink."

He groans. "Dear god no. No more drinking. You're bad enough on a normal day, forget drunk and saying everything you think."

"Buzzkill," Mark mutters.

"I don't want to deal with all those lawsuits. All I want is to go back to sleep. I was having a really nice dream and there was kissing and Dus —"

" _Stop talking_ ," sounds through the phone, practically shouted. "I don't want to know anything about those dreams. Nothing, Chris. _Less than nothing_."

“But it’s really hard to stop thinking about,” he whines, “Because the kissing was nice and there was cuddling and then he started—”

Mark cuts him off again, this time by hanging up.

A few minutes later, as Chris is still mumbling into the darkness about Dustin’s lips, his phone buzzes softly.

_i’m texting you so i can control what i say, the message says. but we need to make this stop somehow because dustin is saying really frightening things i don’t want to hear. what should we do?_

“Hell if I know,” he says. As he starts typing, though, another message appears on his phone.

_Hi Chris. This is kind of out-of-nowhere but … is something really weird is going on with me._

He gapes for a moment, saying “Why the fucking fuck is Wardo texting me?” before processing enough (verbally, of course; this is going to be a pain the ass, he knows) that it means Wardo’s probably stuck saying all his thoughts as well.

 _Yes_ , he texts back, too tired and worn down to bother mincing words, _I’ve been saying everything I think out loud. It blows_.

As soon as Eduardo texts back, succinct and quick ( _Me too_ ), Chris types out a message to Dustin, sharing the relevant information ( _it’s happening to Wardo too_ ) with him.

Dustin takes a while to respond (probably because he had to explain everything to Mark, which presumably got a little ugly), but eventually he does.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that he’s actual making sense or taking a reasonable approach to the problem.

 _So we’re all saying everything we think rite? Its prob b/c the universeeeee wants us to be friends again and it wont go away until mark and wardo bone or sth_.

Seconds later, Chris’s phone buzzes again, and another text from Dustin appears on the screen.

_We should lock them up together until they start banging not fighting and then we wouldn’t tell everyone all our secretsssssss._

“Worst fucking idea ever,” Chris says to himself.

But then he reconsiders a bit, because he really fucking doesn’t want to go around telling the world his deepest darkest secrets, and having Mark and Eduardo speaking to each other again would be nice (if for no other reason than that death-glaring at each other across parties is annoyingly hard to spin into “Of course, Misters Zuckerberg and Saverin are, while not best friends, on cordial speaking terms with each other” in any believable way). And, though certainly not an ideal solution, locking them up while they’re forced to tell each other the truth might be a step in the right direction.

Chris frowns, realizing that neither he nor Dustin should be exposed to the general public either. It would end … badly, to say the least.

So he taps out a message to Eduardo, because Dustin's point is, perhaps, more valid than he thought it would be. (He fudges the details of what the initial message a little, grateful that he can at least lie in text.) _It's the four of us_ , he types, _You, me, Dustin, and Mark. Dustin thinks the universe is trying to tell us to work things out. He also thinks that we should shut ourselves up together so that we won't completely destroy our lives by blabbing our secrets to strangers. I know it's DUSTIN but he might be on the right track._

After some complicated (and rambling) negotiations involving where Eduardo was comfortable being, and Mark and Dustin's levels of inebriation, the four of them are sitting on Dustin's couch. Well, Mark was more slumped in a drunken stupor.

"I cut him off three hours ago," Dustin says, "But he kept distracting me by saying things I never want to hear like how he sometimes ma--"

"Stop!" yell Chris and Eduardo simultaneously. "We don't want to know either!"

"But it's gross and I want everyone to suffer," Dustin whines.

Chris, in a flash of inspiration, turns on the TV. "I have an idea," he says. "Focus on this, Dustin. It'll keep you from babbling things no one wants to know about Mark."

"Huh?" says Mark.

Dustin is narrating the show he's watching under his breath, but fortunately he's doing so quietly enough that no one else can hear him.

"I don't want to be here," Eduardo announces.

"It's not like anyone actually wants you here either," Mark rebuts, slurring his words.

"Ignore Mark, he's a drunk jackass," says Chris. "I want you here because I trust you more than Mark and Dustin."

Turning away from the TV, Dustin adds, "I want you here, too, because I miss you." Then his face falls and he says, soft, "You don't trust me, Chris?"

"Because you," he starts to say, but then slaps a hand over his mouth. Before any more words can spill out, Chris stands up and walks out. He heads to Dustin’s bedroom, yelling down the stairs that he’s taking it and Dustin can fucking sleep on the couch, and locks the door behind him.

 

\----------

 

The next morning, Mark wakes up feeling like someone is beating his skull with a hammer, a feeling he promptly announces to the empty room. He feels his mouth moving, detailing the sensation for the absolutely no one listening to him, which is deeply annoying. Additionally, the noise is not helping his headache. He pulls a pillow over his head and focuses on the silence around him until he falls asleep again.

Several hours later, he wakes again. Stumbling downstairs in a desperate search for coffee, he sees Dustin sitting on the couch murmuring as he watches TV. "I hate that show," Mark says to himself as he walks into the kitchen.

Neither Chris nor Eduardo is anywhere to be seen, which doesn't particularly surprise him. He's certainly planning on slinking back to the room he claimed with coffee and one of Dustin's laptops, mostly to avoid blurting out anything about those dreams he used to have, especially that one he really liked, where Chr--Mark starts thinking resolutely about the drip of the coffee maker, watching intently as the droplets fall. Focusing on predicting when the next drop will fall occupies him until the coffee is done, at which point he does indeed sneak back upstairs and wires in.

Mark spends the rest of the day coding, ignoring the world and especially the people who might hear his stream-of-consciousness mutterings. (Not that anyone would be interested in him narrating his coding, and that’s one reason he’s glad for his single-minded focus; no extraneous thoughts about people or feelings creep in while he’s working.)

When he surfaces hours later, though, he realizes that his voice is hoarse and his throat is sore and scratchy. And, he grumbles (because despite the discomfort, he can't stop narrating his life), he's really hungry. It's a choice, he knows, between talking to himself about how hungry he is for a few hours, until everyone else will be asleep, or risking a short encounter to get some food.

His stomach rumbles loudly.

\---

When Mark enters the kitchen, he sees Eduardo sitting at the table, focused intently on a  
book with his lips moving almost soundlessly. Next to him sit an empty plate and a half-full glass of water.

"I was hoping you wouldn't be here," Mark says.

"What?" Eduardo says, bitter, but he doesn't stop there. "Oh, that? Don't worry, the feeling is mutual."

Mark sneers. "Stop looking at me like I'm something pond scum would scrape off its shoe."

Without missing a beat, Eduardo replies, "You are something pond scum would scrape off its shoe. You've read Dante, you know who goes to the lowest circle of hell."

"I what?" Mark fumbles his thoughts, angry words falling haphazard from his lips. "How long have you been waiting to use that line?" he finally asks. "I know you didn't just come up with it on the spot, it's too clever."

"A while," Eduardo blurts. "But it's just so perfect. And I’m clever enough to come up with something like that on the spot, jackass."

"Oh my god," he replies, rolling his eyes, "Do you think you're enough of a self-righteous douchebag?"

"Self-righteous? Seriously? I'm not the one who treated his best friend like a piece of shit and won't even apologize for it because he believes he can do no wrong. And you're calling me self-righteous?" Eduardo looks like a skeptical deer, a thought Mark desperately wishes he hadn’t voiced.

“You are self-righteous!” Mark snaps, trying to recover from the deer comment. “It’s not like you ever admit to doing anything wrong ever.” After a brief pause, he hears himself mutter, “That sounded a lot whinier than I meant it to.”

“I do, but only when I actually am wrong!”

Mark snorts. “Now you’re being self-righteous and childish.”

“Like you’re ever not self-righteous and childish,” Eduardo says, smirking.

“You started it,” Mark replies churlishly. “That was a childish thing to say. But you really did start it; you treated me like shit for a hell of a lot longer. All you cared about was making money to impress your father--who, by the way, is a bigger asshole than I could ever be even if I tried."

"Okay, that's probably true!" Eduardo says, somewhere between grumbling and yelling.

"No fucking kidding! He seriously messed you up."

Eduardo slams his book down on the table. "Leave it. You seriously messed me up too, you dick. At least my father never completely betrayed me. I always knew where I stood with him, but with you? I should have seen it coming because you never think about anything but how to make your own life easier."

"I don't," Mark says, his thoughts a jumbled mess, "But you ... I can't even answer that because there are too many parts and none of them are right. Now I'm not even making sense!"

Laughing meanly, Eduardo says, "I'm not going to put up with you any more," and storms out.

"Fuck you!" Mark yells at his retreating form. "You never even tried to understand!"

At the far end of the living room, Eduardo stops and turns, yelling back, "Yeah, but I still got your money and your shares!"

"That doesn't even make sense," Mark grumbles. "It wasn't about the money."

 

\----------

 

When Chris wakes up the next morning, the first words that come out of his mouth, scratchy and low, are "Where am I?"

Rubbing his eyes blearily and looking around the room, he realizes that he's in Dustin's bedroom, surrounded by bedding that smells distinctly of Dustin's shampoo and--"Fuck," he heard himself say, "I know what Dustin's shampoo smells like. I am in so far over my head."

He snorts. "Like I didn't know that already."

Too horrified, depressed, scared to deal with the possibility of encountering a wild Dustin in its natural habitat should be go downstairs, Chris grabs the laptop he sees on the dresser and crawls back into bed with it. (The password is "Markgetoffmycomputer.") He mumbles his way through two hours of emails, until the dryness in his throat and his complaining stomach force him to slink out of his cave (that isn’t really his, it’s Dustin’s, but he’s trying not to dwell on that).

Biting his lip and choking back the overwhelming worry that he will end up confessing his love to Dustin (or, worse, hear Dustin confess his love for someone else; despite knowing beyond any reasonable doubt that Dustin will never be in love with him, Chris is absolutely positive that he would have a meltdown if confronted with spoken evidence of Dustin’s lips of that fact), Chris leaves the room and heads for the kitchen. He takes the laptop with him, hoping that it will focus his thoughts and prevent anything too embarrassing from escaping his mouth.

When Chris enters the kitchen, he sees Mark sitting at the table, staring blanking at a crossword puzzle. His mouth is moving (his pen is not) but the words are too soft for Chris to hear. He’s frowning slightly.

Before he gets to the kitchen, though, Chris hears another voice.

"You," Dustin yells from the living room, "Are such an asshole, Mark."

"You tell me that once a week," Mark replies.

Chris has his hand clamped over his mouth, muffling his reactions; it's been a long time since he was privy to Mark and Dustin's relationship, such as it is. He knows it suffered tremendously after the dilution, but he never sought out information after that. Mark and Dustin had always just been ... Mark and Dustin, and the ups and downs of their friendship were theirs to handle.

"I don't usually mean it," Dustin continues, "But I mean it now."

There's a rustle of upholstery and cushions in the living room, then footsteps and a chair scraping on the floor. Dustin had gone into the kitchen then.

"Like hell I'm going in now," Chris says.

“You know I don’t actually care, right?” Mark asks in reply.

“Oh please,” Dustin says, voice a little kinder. “You’ve always cared, you just pretend you don’t. You've been doing it for as long as I've known you, and it's never worked very well.”

Mark sighs, almost too quiet for Chris to hear. "Eduardo disagrees with you."

The noise Dustin makes is familiar to Chris, as familiar as the sound of his laugh or the way he gloats when he wins a video game. Chris described it once as his "oh Mark" noise; it's somewhere between a groan and a sigh, almost like an eye-roll given sound.

Chris really wishes he weren't saying all that out loud.

(He wishes he hadn't said that out loud, either.)

Dustin's next words match his noise perfectly. "Oh Mark," he says. "Eduardo thinks you're an asshole who doesn't care about anyone because you treated him like you were. It's not rocket science."

"The hell I did!" Mark answers, his voice tense. Chris can practically hear him turn defensive--but Dustin can't stop himself (not that any of them could, given this new verbal diarrhea situation).

"We need to fix this," Chris grumbles. "We're going to end up killing each other."

"Mark," Dustin says. Then, "Mark! How can you not see that you fucked everything up when you diluted Eduardo's shares? Everything, Mark. Everything. It wasn't just you and Eduardo, it was all four of us. Every time I fuck up--every time Chris fucks up--I get worried that you'll decide we're not worth keeping around. And Chris doesn't trust me because he thinks I was involved but he never says anything, just looks at me funny and doesn't tell me anything."

Dustin was not supposed to know that.

"You didn't just ruin your relationship with your best friend. You ruined mine, too."

Footsteps sound in the kitchen again, this time heading back to the living room. Chris hears the soft murmur of the TV and is momentarily grateful that he successfully avoided an encounter with Dustin.

"On the other hand," he hears himself say, "He has me parsed a lot better than I thought he did. That's ... not good."

He stays in the hall until his mind has calmed, so that he's not replaying Dustin's words in his head, the ones that show exactly how well Dustin knows him.

 

\----------

 

“Jesus,” Mark says as Chris enters the kitchen. “I was hoping to eat alone so that I wouldn’t tell anyone my thoughts.”

“You’re not the only one,” Chris grumbles.

Mark turns back to his computer and starts to mutter that he’s going to code now and if Chris doesn’t want hear about it he can damn well just leave the kitchen, but before the words leave his mouth, Chris speaks again.

“I heard your argument with Dustin.”

There’s a brief pause, during which Mark doesn’t look away from his computer but does hear something that sounds like Chris’s hand slapping over his mouth.

“Whatever,” he says.

“Shit shit shit I didn’t want to tell you that,” Chris says. “Shit shit shit shit.”

“Who gives a fuck?” Mark asks. “It’s not like we said anything you didn’t already know.”

Chris lets out a short laugh.

“That wasn’t funny,” he says just as Chris explains, “That was not the point _at all_ , Mark.”

He hears himself laugh, sharp and honest. “Well, it’s a good thing I have you, then.”

“I—Oh,” Chris says softly. His cheeks are slightly pink.

(“You’re blushing,” Mark announces under his breath.)

“Thank you,” Chris continues, surprisingly warm. He’s smiling. “I don’t think you’ve ever said anything that nice to me before.”

“I wouldn’t have said it if it weren’t for this stupid fucking word vomit we all have going on.”

But Chris is still smiling. “Trust me when I say I know that. But you know what they say, it’s the thought that counts.”

Mark turns back to his computer, feeling his cheeks warm. “I’m ready to not be having this conversation anymore.”

“I don’t know,” Chris replies, “I’m kind of enjoying how uncomfortable you are with your emotions.”

There’s a lull in their actual conversation; Chris whispers to himself about what kind of sandwich he’s going to make and Mark starts flicking through the windows he has open, muttering that he needs to find something distracting.

Unfortunately for his comfort level, he hasn’t fully tuned out when Chris says, soft and _clearly_ hoping that he won’t be heard, “Mark’s cute when he blushes.”

At normal volume, Mark says, “I— _what_?”

“Fuck,” Chris snaps. “Fuck, I fucking hate this.”

Mark runs his hands over his face. “It sucks so much,” he says, but because he has stupid verbal diarrhea and everything is completely fucked up, he follows it with “Do you really think I’m cute?”

“Oh my god,” he says as soon as he hears the words in his voice. “I am not a twelve-year-old girl, ignore that.”

Before he’s even finished saying it, though, he hears “Yes,” in Chris’s soothing voice. It’s coming from a lot closer, and when he looks up he realizes that Chris has flopped into another chair at the kitchen table.

Mark feels himself smile. “Yeah?”

Chris cocks his head and grins, broad and a little shit-eating, and answers “Yeah.”

“Everyone thinks you’re cute,” Mark blurts, causing Chris to flush all the way to the roots of his hair.

“I had such a crush on you freshman year,” he continues. “I really wish I weren’t telling you all this, but you were smart and funny and cute and you didn’t take bullshit from anyone and—”

Chris has slipped off his chair and is kneeling in front of Mark’s. “What are you doing?” Mark asks.

“Shut up,” he says.

And then—“Holy shit,” he murmurs—Chris is kissing him.

As kisses go, it’s nothing exceptional; just a press of lips, no tongue, he doesn’t see stars. But it’s nice, the touch of Chris’s soft mouth against his. The kiss doesn’t linger, and when Chris does pull back, Mark hears him start whispering to himself, too low to be heard.

What he does catch is him saying, “I’ve wondered what that would be like.”

Running through Mark’s head is “Believe me, that is _not_ the best I can do,” but there is no way in hell he is going to say that out loud, so before he has time to form the words, he leans forward and presses his mouth to Chris’s again.

And this time?

It’s a serious kiss, with one of Chris’s hands burying itself in Mark’s hair and drawing him closer. Mark’s hand is curled around Chris’s bicep, tightening unconsciously when he feels Chris lick at his lips. All the words he’s half-forming, vague thoughts about lips and teeth and tongues, are being swallowed by Chris’s mouth.

He hears a disgusting sort of slurping noise that he’s pretty sure he made, but he’s too busy kissing across Chris’s jaw towards his ear to _really_ care. A stray coherent thought tumbles from his mouth onto the soft skin, “The part of me that’s still eighteen is really proud of itself right now.”

Suddenly, Mark feels Chris pull away, hissing “shit” under his breath.

“Shit,” Chris says at normal volume. “Shit, I am not going to do this.”

“What the fuck?” Mark asks.

“I don’t do this anymore,” Chris continues.

“You’re really not making any sense.”

Chris takes a deep breath. “I don’t do this anymore,” he says, seemingly half to himself. “I don’t make out with anyone who calls me cute just because I can.”

“Ha!” Mark tries not to cackle but it doesn’t go very well. “I _knew_ that’s what you would do at all those parties at Harvard even though you never admitted it. Shit, sorry, Dustin told me never to tell you that.”

“It’s nice to know that you actually do have a verbal filter,” Chris says weakly. And then, face buried in his hands, “Dustin knew what I was like in college?”

“We all knew,” Mark answers curtly.

“Fuck,” comes the whining response. “I didn’t want him to know.”

“Why?” Mark asks. “Is it because you’re in love with him?”

“Don’t tell me everyone knows that, too.”

“I have to,” Mark says, feeling himself smirk a little. “I’m thinking it right now: everyone knows that you’re in love with Dustin.”

“I want to _die_ ,” Chris says simply, letting his head fall forward against the table.

“Also,” Mark continues, “If you wanted to leave before this turns into a conversation about our feelings, that would be okay.”

“Yeah, good plan.”

Chris snatches his sandwich and leaves as quickly as Mark has ever seen him. As his footsteps fade down the hall, Mark announces to his computer, “Thank God we didn’t talk about Eduardo.”

 

\----------

 

Chris slams the bedroom door behind him. He drops his paper towel-wrapped sandwich on Dustin’s dresser and slams the door.

He’s about to curl up on the bed and pretend he doesn’t want to cry when there’s a knock at the door. Under his breath, he mutters a few choice words, following them with “I don’t want to talk to anyone,” as he goes to open the door.

“What do you want?” he snaps to Eduardo.

“I don’t know,” Eduardo answers, blunt (not that he had a choice).

“Just come inside and close the door behind you. I don’t want to talk to Mark or Dustin,” Chris says.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m in love with Dustin and I just made out with Mark,” Chris blurts.

“You did _what_?” Eduardo asks, something Chris can’t identify flashing in his eyes.

“I told you, I made out with Mark.”

Eduardo’s whole body looks tense, something Chris mumbles about as Eduardo says, “ _You made out with Mark._ ”

Well, he’s awfully hung up on that, Chris thinks. “You’re awfully hung up on that,” he says.

He didn’t actually know people could turn as red as Eduardo does, but apparently they can.

And then Eduardo is talking. “Shit,” he begins, “I know I shouldn’t care who Mark kisses.”

“No, you really shouldn’t,” Chris agrees. “Oh crap, Eduardo, I shouldn’t have said that. Don’t feel bad for being a little stuck on Mark. It happens.”

“You would know,” Eduardo snorts. “How long have you been mooning over Dustin now?”

“I, um,” he starts, “I don’t remember, exactly. I think it started around the same time as Facemash.”

Eduardo laughs. “That was meant to be rhetorical, man. But damn, that’s a long time.”

Chris feels himself redden, and says, meanly, “You’d know. It’s almost as long as you’ve been pining after Mark.”

“Fuck you,” is the abrupt response. “At least I have a good reason for not doing anything about it. I hate him, he hates me, we haven’t spoken since 2005. Do you want me to keep going?”

“You hate him but you’re still mad that he kissed someone else? That is _seriously_ messed up.”

Eduardo’s answer is wry. “Tell me about it.” He sinks onto the edge of the bed and looks at Chris, his eyes serious. “No,” he says after a beat, “What’s seriously messed up is that I’m even here talking to you.”

“What?” Chris asks flatly.

When Eduardo starts speaking, it’s so uncharacteristically open that Chris is momentarily taken aback. “I don’t trust you,” Eduardo says, so blunt it hurts almost physically. “I haven’t trusted you since the dilution, because you proved that you’d choose Dustin and Mark over me, no matter the circumstances. I know you thought it was wrong—”

“It _was_ wrong,” Chris cuts in.

“But you didn’t stop them and you stayed at Facebook and …” Eduardo trails off for a moment, his words too quiet for Chris to hear. “And you’re too … God, Chris, I don’t even know how to put it into words but I know that you’ll always pick Dustin and Dustin will always pick you and Mark _did_ pick you two and none of you really wanted me around but for some stupid reason I’m still here and I still think about Mark and I hate that I still come when one of you calls and I hate myself for being here and I really, _really_ hate that I’m telling you all this.”

Eduardo’s face is buried in his hands, and Chris feels the countless thoughts bouncing around his head falling from his lips only to be cut off by another before they’re completed.

Finally, his mind settles on one he almost likes, and he forces the others away as best he can.

“I shouldn’t have stayed.”

“ _What_?” Eduardo says.

“I shouldn’t have stayed at Facebook,” Chris reiterates. “I should have told Mark to go fuck himself and then gone back to school to stay and moved to New York after graduation to start a nonprofit. Or maybe I should have taken the job offer I got in 2007 and gone to work for the Obama campaign instead of sticking around because Dustin sometimes looks at me for too long across the fishbowl and I _wonder._ ”

“Ours lives are pretty fucked up,” Eduardo says, wry.

Chris sits down next to him. “No freaking kidding.”

Before he leaves, Eduardo gives him a sardonic look and says, “Do you think the universe is trying to fix us or something?”

“That sounds like something Dustin would suggest,” Chris answers.

“You know,” Eduardo adds, suddenly sincere, “I don’t think there’s anything messed up between you two that can’t be fixed.”

Chris frowns. “Maybe.”

 

\---

 

Of course, it takes him another six hours to actually go downstairs and talk to Dustin.

"You're avoiding me," Dustin blurts the moment Chris walks into the living room.

Chris's words, as usual, echo his thoughts. "I, but, you, you weren't supposed to notice," he whispers. He takes a deep breath and continues, "I'm thinking really hard now. I haven't been avoiding you."

For about five seconds, that hangs in the air between them, but Chris feels his mouth open again and out of it spills, "That was a lie. I've definitely been avoiding you."

Dustin laughs. "Did you actually try lying, dude? That's adorable. How did you do it?"

"If you think really hard about the lie and nothing else, it works for a little bit," he answers. "Why are you laughing at me?"

"I told you that already," is the reply, with matching eye-rolling. "It's adorable. You're so desperate to maintain some semblance of dignity that you'll try _anything_ to avoid telling the whole truth all the time, even to your best friends."

It's kind of spot on, Chris realizes. "That's kind of spot on," he says.

"Christ," Dustin says, looking sad, "I wish you trusted me enough to be comfortable with telling me the truth. I'm your best friend. I'm not just your best friend, I'm—Shit. I am _not_ going to say that out loud, I don't care what this stupid thing is, I am not just going to spring it on you that I'm in love with you."

("You look sad," Chris mumbles as Dustin monologues.)

Fuck.

 _What_?

Dustin's hands are planted over his mouth, but he's mumbling into them. Chris can't make out every word (which, of course, he announces) but the gist is that Dustin thinks he shouldn't have said that out loud and now Chris will hate him and, well, there are a lot of thoughts jumbling around in Chris's head right now, bouncing off each other and trying to force their way to the top--but over all of them is one two-part, horribly contradictory thought.

"I could never hate you," Chris says, "And I don't want to tell you the second half of this because it'll make you sad, but I don't trust you because I'm too scared that, any time I fuck up at work, Mark will decide to fire me and you won't do anything."

“He wouldn’t!” Dustin’s voice is loud, almost yelling, but he glances down after he says it, and continues, “He would.”

Chris says it at the same time, “He would.”

“I wouldn’t let him,” Dustin adds sincerely.

“Could you stop him?”

“Probably not, but he’d have to fire me, too.” Dustin’s face is beet-red, and he’s avoiding making eye contact with Chris almost as much as Chris is avoiding making eye contact with him.

“That’s really sweet,” Chris blurts out.

When Dustin looks up at him, his eyes are big and hopeful and Chris would give his left arm to see that expression every day for the rest of his life.

He tells him.

Before he’s is entirely aware of what’s going on, Dustin grabs him by the hip and _pulls_ until Chris is in his lap, then winds a hand around his neck and kisses him.

“What are you doing?” Chris gasps against Dustin’s insistent mouth, but the words are swallowed and really, he’s more focused on kissing back.

After a long moment, Dustin pulls back. When he does, Chris—because his brain works in inexplicable ways that make him want to crawl into the floor and die—hears himself say, "I kissed Mark earlier."

Dustin's eyes do something Chris doesn't entirely comprehend, and his voice is low when he says "Really?"

“Yeah,” Chris says. “It wasn’t … it wasn’t a big deal, though. It’s not like I’m in love with him or anything.”

“Mmhmm,” Dustin says, hands uncomfortably tight on Chris’s hips. “Why did you do it?”

He shrugs. “Mark’s cute.”

“Is that why you kissed me?” Dustin asks, soft, and Chris wants to curl his fingers in Dustin’s hair and bring back his dopey, hopeful smile.

“I want to make you smile,” Chris says. “I kissed you because I always want to kiss you. And because you kissed me.”

Dustin smiles.

Chris feels a thousand horrifically sappy thoughts forming in his mind and presses his mouth to Dustin’s before he can voice any of them.

 

\----------

 

Mark’s bored.

He doesn’t even remember the last time he was bored. It was probably in high school, without a laptop to distract him in class.

But either way, he’s bored now. And his throat hurts from talking to himself constantly.

He closes his computer and stares out the window of Dustin’s guest bedroom for a moment.

Finally, he mutters “Fuck this,” and gets up to leave the room.

Wandering toward the kitchen, not so much for food as for a different place to be, he mumbles, “Maybe I should go outside.”

A voice behind him answers. “I didn’t even know you knew what outside is.”

Mark rolls his eyes. “Very funny,” he says. “That was definitely the first time anyone ever made that joke.”

Eduardo snorts. “I’m pretty sure it’s not even the first time _I’ve_ made it.”

“No, it isn’t.” Mark turns around, looking at Eduardo, who is mussed, dressed in wrinkled khakis and a too-short t-shirt that’s probably Dustin’s. “Is that Dustin’s shirt?”

“What?” Eduardo says. “Oh, uh, yeah, it is.”

“It’s too small,” Mark says, eyes running across the narrow band of skin between the shirt and khakis. “I can see your stomach.”

“Are you checking me out?” Eduardo asks, as Mark continues with “I’m staring.”

It takes a moment for the words to process, but as soon as they do, Mark feels himself admitting that yes, he is staring at the strip of bare skin above the waist of Eduardo’s pants and yes, it’s distracting to the point that calling it _attraction_ would not be unreasonable.

Except it comes out more like “I’m definitely checking you out.”

Eduardo’s eyes bug out of his head. “Oh,” he says flatly.

“Your eyes are ridiculously large,” Mark says. “Shit, why am I saying all these stupid things?”

“Hell if I know,” Eduardo answers. Mark’s still staring at the strip of skin, watching it shift as Eduardo reaches into the cabinet for a glass. It’s smooth and tanned, almost exactly what he’d imagined running his tongue across at least once a week in college and—

“I just said all of that out loud, didn’t I?” he asks, noting Eduardo’s gaping mouth and red cheeks.

“Uh, yeah,” he replies, sounding a little choked. Then, too fast and almost incomprehensible, “I would have let you.”

“Wait, really?” Mark gaps, dumbfounded. “God, if I’d known that my sex life would have been so much better.”

Eduardo’s eyes narrow. “Hold on. You’re saying that you wanted to sleep with me in college and all you did about it was ignore me and dilute my shares in a company we fucking ran together?”

“How is that even relevant?” Mark asks, frowning.

“You’re _seriously_ asking that?”

Mark bites his lip before he answers. “Is it because other people can’t compartmentalize as well as I can? Chris keeps telling me that.”

“God,” Eduardo says, “At least someone is trying, even though you’re clearly a lost cause.”

“Your optimism is touching.”

There’s a brief pause, during which Eduardo’s lips move but the words are too soft to hear. The only think Mark can think is “It wasn’t personal,” which he’s been assured a thousand times over _isn’t good enough_ , and he realizes just how true that was when the words leave his mouth and Eduardo—Eduardo _snaps_.

(He can recognize it because he’s seen it before and isn’t likely to forget it—ever, basically.)

“Everything was personal, you complete asshole, I was in love with you!”

Mark’s mind actually goes blank. He says nothing because he’s incapable of forming complete thoughts, just fragments of words and almost-feelings.

Finally, a complete thought forms. Of course, it’s just “ _what_?!” but at least he manages to get a word out.

“I. was. in. love. with. you,” Eduardo grinds out.

Weakly, Mark says, “I had no idea.”

Eduardo rolls his eyes. “No kidding,” he says, almost laughing, but his voice is cold. “But maybe you would have known if you’d paid attention to anything except your computer.”

“Oh, please,” Mark sneers. “You knew me well enough to know that I wouldn’t pick up on anything. If you wanted me to know, you should have told me.”

If Eduardo rolls his eyes any more, Mark decides, they’re going to get stuck turned toward the ceiling. Eduardo’s lips don’t even twitch when he says that aloud, he just starts speaking, tense and bitter.“First of all, who says that I wanted you to know? Second of all, you paid attention to Sean pretty damn well.”

And that, well.

“It wasn’t like that at all!” Mark yells.

“Well it fucking felt like it was. You _listened __to him, Mark. I spent _two years_ trying to get you to hear me and all it took was him showing up and you were listening to every stupid, manipulative word that left his mouth!”_

“Yeah, but,” Mark begins, harsh, but the thought crumbles. The one that rises in its place isn’t something he ever wants to voice ever, because he might actually dissolve from embarrassment, but he feels the words bubbling up in his throat and before they escape it, he acts.

Pressing Eduardo back into the counter, he reaches up and seals their mouths together.

“The fuck?” Eduardo mumbles, but he’s kissing back harshly, dragging his teeth along Mark’s lower lip and pulling too hard at Mark’s hips.

Mark, of course, is squirming into the touch like he wants to crawl inside Eduardo’s skin because no matter how good fantasies and dreams are, reality is always better and Eduardo’s mouth tastes of something Mark can’t quite identify and isn’t sure he wants to, either. He tears his mouth away from Eduardo’s, feels teeth scrape his skin raw, and does something with his lips and teeth and tongue to the side of Eduardo’s neck that could maybe be loosely defined as a kiss.

“Your neck is salty,” he mouths, lips pressed too closely to skin for the words to be audible but Eduardo groans anyway.

“I’ve wanted to do this since I was nineteen,” he hears in his ear.

Well, that—Mark isn’t quite sure what to make of it, but the words that come out of his mouth, probably coming form some part of himself that he doesn’t understand and, consequently, just kind of ignores, are “That’s really kind of hot,” and he sounds completely stupid saying it but before he can actually get the words to say _that_ out of his mouth, Eduardo’s eyes have gone wide and he’s pushing away from the counter, shoving Mark towards the middle of the kitchen.

“You’re really kind of hot,” he says.

Mark wants to laugh, because it’s a stupid thing to say, but his brain is too fixated on Eduardo’s lips, swollen and red, for anything in his head to be a real thought that could turn into words. “Oh, um, _oh_ ,” he says instead.

And then Eduardo pushes him backward and presses him into the wall and leans to to fucking _bite_ at the tendon of his neck; it makes Mark’s hips jerk forward into Eduardo’s, and a sharp “Fuck” falls from his lips.

“Shit, Mark,” Eduardo says, his voice strained and uneven, “You’re such a masochist.” He grabs Mark’s hands, which were scrabbling against his chest, desperate to touch the strip of exposed stomach that started this in the first place, and slams them into the wall above Mark’s head, pinning him by the wrists. Mark watches as Eduardo looks him over, hears him say quietly, “It really turns me on,” and sees him blush deep red.

Stupidly, Mark announces that Eduardo saying that really turns _him_ on but before he can follow it up by babbling about the stupidity of it, Eduardo’s mouth is against his, swallowing the words, still a harsh combination of teeth and tongue that makes Mark buck away from the wall seeking friction.

But Eduardo’s hips slip away from his, leaving Mark to hand in midair, wrists trapped and breathing heavy. “God, Eduardo, please,” he groans, and Eduardo grins deviously.

“You’re _begging_ , he says, just this side of gleeful.

“I know,” Mark whines, “But _please_ , I need—”

He inhales sharply, hissing “Oh my god” as Eduardo brushes a light hand across the front of his pants. The light touch disappears and Mark whines, wrenching a hand out free and using it to pull Eduardo’s mouth back to his so that he won’t say anything too embarrassing.

Eduardo’s hips slam into his, and then they’re grinding against each other and swallowing each others’ expletives into yet another bruising kiss until Mark feels himself stiffen and come, shaking slightly against the wall.

He’s left there, leaning against the wall and trying to clear his thoughts when Eduardo jerks away suddenly, his eyes wide with something other than lust. “Fuck,” he says, backing away quickly, “fuck, fuck, fuck. What did I just do?”

Mark’s still staring at him, too dazed to form a clear thought, when he kicks a chair across the room, wrenches the back door open and goes outside, slamming it behind him.

 

\----------

 

When Chris hears a loud thud and then a slam from the other room, he peels his mouth away from Dustin’s and turns to stare at the kitchen. “What was that?” he says.

“Hell if I know,” Dustin answers. “But can we go back to kissing now?”

“I’m too curious about what’s going on in the kitchen,” Chris says, shoving himself off Dustin and turning around. “I can’t see anything.”

“Do you want to go look?” Dustin asks.

Chris grins a little and says, “Absolutely. Don’t you?”

“Duh.”

A little giddy, they tiptoe towards they kitchen. Chris hears Dustin giggling behind behind him, but at least he isn’t saying anything. Before they get close enough to see anything, Mark says “What the fuck?” loudly, causing Chris to jump and then fret, just barely audibly, that Mark will have heard them.

“Oh, shut up,” Dustin says. “Don’t you want to see what happened?”

Chris nods twice, saying “Yes. Yes, I do.”

He’s almost surprised when nothing else comes out of his mouth before they enter the kitchen, but it’s a pleasant kind of surprise. Mark is leaning against the wall, looking—well, looking thoroughly debauched (and like he just came all over himself).

“That’s kind of hot,” Dustin mumbles behind him. “I didn’t realize Mark could be hot.”

“You should be more observant,” Chris says.

Mark bites his lip, looking awfully anxious for someone who _clearly_ just had sex, and then blurts, “I’m not sure, but I think that what what Wardo and I just did counts as having sex. So, uh, Wardo and I just had sex.”

“You did _what_?” Chris asks, but his voice is too flat for it to really be a question.

“I, uh, I guess it was just grinding?” Mark says. “But there was at least one orgasm, so it probably counts as sex.”

“Oh my god,” Chris says, “Was that _ever_ not what I was asking.”

Mark stares at him blankly, saying, “What were you asking?”

“You couldn’t figure that out by yourself?” Chris asks, voice tense and incredulous, “Jesus Christ, Mark, I was asking what the fuck you were doing with Eduardo—and not in the obvious, we-were-having-sex sense, in the sense of _do you have any fucking clue how much what you do fucks up everything in my life_?”

The rest of the room is deadly silent. Dustin’s mouth is moving but the words aren’t audible, and Mark just gapes.

Chris continues speaking. “I don’t know why I’m even surprised, given how astoundingly insensitive you are. I mean, you completely screwed over your best friend. Why should it surprise me that you’re willing to hurt him even more?”

He takes a deepth breath that was meant to be calming, but the pause is just enough time for Chris’s train of thought to shift slightly, and he finds himself saying even more. “You do realize that no one trusts you, right? You could swear on your mother’s soul—or facebook’s soul or the soul of whatever you love most in the world—that my contract was safe and I would still get it looked over by an outside lawyer. And you made Dustin complicit.” Chris can tell that his voice is shaking, but the words are spilling too easily; he doesn’t really want to stop now that he’s started.

“You made my best friend an accessory to the way you treated Eduardo. He knew that something was happening and he didn’t say anything and how am I supposed to trust him  
now?”

Rounding on Dustin, he says what feels like the end of his tirade. “Tell me, Dustin. How the _hell_ am I supposed to trust you?”

This time, the deep breath Chris takes is actually steadying. He looks around, sees Dustin standing frozen and gaping, his eyes wide and his mouth slightly open. “Oh my god,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

But the words trail off, and instead he says, too soft for Mark or Dustin to hear, “No, I did mean it.”

Behind him, Chris hears the soft click of a door being opened, and sees Eduardo standing there, his face almost white. He’s staring at Chris, his mouth moving almost soundlessly.

To his credit, he thinks (and says, soft, to himself), he doesn’t actually run out of the kitchen. Instead, he calmly pours himself a glass of water, swallowing it down so quickly that he doesn’t think about anything except the the sharp cold on his thoat and the vaguely unpleasant sloshing in his stomach, and _then_ he walks out of the room as quickly as he can while preserving some semblance of dignity.

Not that his attempt at dignity really makes him feel any better when he sinks to the ground outside of Dustin’s bedroom with his back pressed to the wall and just tries to understand what just happened.

 

\----------

 

Still in the kitchen, Mark glances between Dustin and Eduardo.

Finally, Dustin speaks audibly. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Mark says. “I don’t know what just happened.”

“You wouldn’t,” Eduardo snips, then adds, “But I can make a decent guess.”

“Please,” Dustin replies. “You’ve barely seen him in years, you have no idea what’s going on in his head.”

At this, Eduardo snorts. “Like you do.”

Dustin’s face, which had been set and angry, falls into something that looks decidedly resigned. “I want to disagree with you,” he says, “But that would be lying.”

“I don’t understand,” Mark says softly. “I didn’t want to say that because I didn’t want anyone to know but I guess I already did.”

Cocking his head slightly, Dustin says, "Does that even--No, that does make sense."

Mark ignores him ("I'm ignoring you," he says), turning to Eduardo and asking, "Can you explain?"

Eduardo laughs, bitter and tight. "I can't believe I have to explain to you why your friends might be reluctant to trust you."

"I don't trust him," Dustin adds and Mark feels something unpleasant that he can't articulate; when he opens his mouth (involuntarily) to try, no words come out.

"See? Eduardo says. "When you betray one person's trust, it makes it harder for other people to trust you because they see how much you value it--or rather, don't value it."

"Because people like identifying patterns and assume that behavior is predictable," Mark concludes, the words falling from his mouth despite their being completely unnecessary.

Eduardo's mouth quirks, but somehow it still looks bitter. "I don't know about that, you were the one who studied psychology."

Dustin is mumbling something, but Mark can't hear it and really doesn't care anyway. His mind wanders momentarily, too quickly for him to really voice the thoughts; small pieces of speech escape him but nothing really comprehensible.

And then he hears himself say, despite the thought being only half-formed, "I don't trust anyone."

“God, that’s fucked up,” Dustin says.

“I don’t think I’m even surprised,” Eduardo says almost simultaneously.

Mark rounds on him before he can even consider stopping himself and says essentially the last thing he ever wanted to speak aloud. “I trusted you, and look where _that_ got me.”

“Fuck you,” Eduardo answers him, sharp and cutting.

“ _Stop_ ,” Dustin yells, finally stepping away from the wall. “I am _not_ dealing with this again. Chris was right, you two fuck up our lives way too much. I am not going to stand here here and let you snipe at each other. We are going to fucking do something about this.”

“I’m happy with things the way they are,” Mark says, but as soon as he finishes the sentence he feels another escaping against his will. “That’s not true.”

“Of course it’s not true you complete idiot,” Eduardo tells him, and Mark can feel the glare despite having his face buried firmly in his hands. “No one is happy being lonely.”

“But I’m not …” Mark trails off, and looks around the room. Dustin is avoiding his eyes and looks suspiciously like he’s on the verge of tears. Eduardo is staring him down, mouth firmly set. “Am I lonely?” Mark asks.

This time it’s Dustin who snaps at him, voice a little hoarse and more than a little strained. “Yes, Mark,” he says, looking almost like he wants to start throwing punches. “You are so _incredibly_ lonely that sometimes just being around you is depressing.”

“Oh,” Mark hears himself say.

“Look,” Eduardo says, “I hate being here and I kind of hate you guys a bit sometimes, but isn’t there anything we can do to make this less completely miserable?”

“Probably not,” Mark mutters. “We’ll probably be stuck like this for the rest of our lives.”

“Well, wait,” Dustin cuts in. “The only people with the word vomit problem are the four of us, so it’s probably somehow actually _related_ to us, right?”

“I guess that makes sense,” Mark and Eduardo say almost simultaneously.

“So then it makes sense that the way to fix it will be something to do with us,” Dustin continues. “Like, we need to fix _ourselves_ , and then we’ll be able to control our mouths again.”

“Easier said than done,” Eduardo answers, snide.

“What if we all just sat down and talked?” Mark hears himself ask. He immediately reviews the thought and adds, “No, that’s a terrible idea. I don’t know why I suggested it and I _definitely_ don’t want to do it.”

“But it might work,” Dustin says, entirely too enthusiastically.

Eduardo looks at Mark, then at at Dustin. Mark resists the urge to turn away or bury his face in his hands.

“Why are you looking at me?” he grumbles instead. “I don’t want you to be watching me. It makes me nervous.”

“You know,” Eduardo says, “I think Dustin’s right.”

“Oh please,” Mark says. “It’s a terrible idea.”

Eduardo stares him down. “It really can’t get much worse than it already is. We might as well go for it.”

“That’s true,” Mark says, because Eduardo’s right and it’s the first thing he thinks. “I still don’t want to do it.”

“Get over it, Mark,” Dustin rebuts. “You know it’s a good idea, and it makes as much sense as any of this, so you’re going to agree to it.”

“Eventually, yeah,” Mark blurts. “Oh fuck, I didn’t want to tell you that.”

Dustin grins victoriously. “But now you have. So all we need to do is get Chris to agree and then we can actually try to fix this.” He pauses momentarily, and slumps against the wall a bit. “He’s never going to, is he?”

“Probably not,” Eduardo says.

“We need to try, though,” Dustin replies.

“I don’t think we’ll get much of anywhere without him,” Mark says, thinking briefly of how much Chris must have been holding in.

“You’re right,” Eduardo tells him. “Chris was holding so much in; he absolutely needs to talk _someone_.”

“So, how do we get him to agree?” Mark asks.

“Um,” begins Eduardo.

“I’ll go talk to him first,” Dustin announces abruptly. “I kind of want the chance to talk to him alone anyway.”

“Why?” Mark asks, faster than he can think through the relevant information and answer it for himself.

“Because I’m in love with him,” Dustin answers, and then promptly turns beet red. “Oh, I, um, didn’t mean to announce that, it’s kind of private, so if you guys just want to pretend that didn’t happen, it would really be okay …”

He turns and walks out of the room, presumably going to seek Chris out.

“Yeah,” Eduardo says, nodding. “I’m totally okay with not getting completely submerged in your love life.”

“I don’t know,” Mark mutters, thankfully too quiet for Eduardo or Dustin’s retreating form to hear. “It could be kinda hot.”

 

\----------

 

When his phone rings, and David's name flashes on the screen, Chris remembers with a horrible sinking feeling that they're still technically dating. As disastrous as their dinner was, there was no actual breaking up that happened.

He doesn't answer, mostly for fear he'll tell David a lot of things he doesn't want to hear and that Chris doesn't want to say anyway (at least not to someone else; he doesn't think he has much choice about saying them). But just seeing the name being up a wave of guilt he could probably have lived without, except that, at the same time, he thinks he kind of needs it.

Chris lets his head flop back against the wall, taking a brief moment of masochistic pleasure when the dull pain distracts him from the ringing phone and from his jumbled thoughts.

"I don't know what to do," he says to the empty hall. "David doesn't deserve this, I know that for sure. I should break up with him, but if I call him I'll end up babbling and breaking up over text is an awful thing to do."

"Oh my god," Chris hears. He presses his fingers to his mouth, confused, before he realizes that Dustin is standing at the end of the hall. "You're dating someone?" Dustin continues. "And you didn't even tell me? _And you kissed me_?"

He sounds angry—and hurt, and Chris suddenly processes his earlier slip all the way. "You're in love with me?"

"Yes," Dustin answers, blunt and open and— _sure_. More than anything, it's his confidence that takes Chris by surprise.

"I," he begins, but the thought trails off into garbled blankness.

"Why didn't you tell me you were seeing someone?" Dustin asks, slipping down the wall to sit next to him.

"I don't know," Chris answers. "I think I was trying to slowly extricate you from my personal life so that it wouldn't hurt when you eventually chose Mark over me. But we talked about that already."

"Yeah," Dustin says. "But it still hurts that you did it."

"I'm not sorry," Chris hears himself say. "Shit, no," he adds. "I _want_ to be sorry, but I'm just not."

Dustin schools his face and whispers something that Chris can't hear. When he raises his voice to a normal volume, what he says is "Look, trying to get you to trust me again isn't why I came up here."

"Oh really?" Chris says, with entirely more cutting sarcasm than he intends.

"Yeah, _really_ ," Dustin snaps. "Eduardo and I—and sort of Mark—think that we should all just sit down and try to fix things so that we can stop blabbing all our thoughts."

"That sounds like it's asking for us to come to blows," Chris replies.

"Maybe," Dustin says. "But is it really worse than us yelling at each other and then having angry sex?"

Chris thinks of the look on Mark's face in the kitchen, hurt and confused and like he didn't at all understand anything that just happened, and he thinks of Eduardo wearing Dustin's shirt and—"Shit," he says, louder than he intended. "Did you and Eduardo hook up or something?"

"Yeah," Dustin says, and then immediately turns the color of the innumerable brick walls at Harvard. "I swear it didn't mean anything. We were just talking and then—we kind of weren't."

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” Chris says. “I don’t like the idea of you sleeping with other people.”

Dustin looks at him bluntly (assuming a look can be blunt). “So then what _do_ you want from me?”

Not meeting his eyes, Chris answers, “I don’t know.”

There’s a brief pause where neither of them speaks, and then Chris says, “Would you have hooked up with Eduardo if it weren’t for our group inability to keep our thoughts to ourselves?”

“Probably not,” Dustin replies.

“You know,” Chris says, fast, the words shaky like his thoughts themselves are uncertain, “I think that it really can’t get much worse than it already is.”

\---

“I’m here,” Chris announces as he walks into the living room behind Dustin. “I’m not entirely sure I want to be, but it can’t make things suck any more, right?”

“Do you hate me?” Mark asks, and then immediately looks horrified with himself. “Oh my god, I didn’t even know I was thinking that,” he says.

Chris settles into a chair and tries not to look anyone in the eye as he answers, telling Mark that he’s really not sure about any of his emotions anymore. The words trail off into whispers that he directs toward his knees. Across the coffee table, he can see Dustin’s mouth moving but can’t hear the words coming out.

Finally, Eduardo breaks the silence. “So,” he says. “How do we do this?”

“I’m not sure,” the rest of them say almost simultaneously, but then Dustin’s mouth opens again.

“Why don’t you trust anyone, Mark?”

Mark’s face barely even changes as he answers. “It’s harder to get hurt that way.”

“That’s heartbreaking,” Chris says. Dustin and Eduardo say things as well, but he can’t hear them over his own mind (and mouth).

“Oh please,” Mark retorts, after he mumbles that pity makes him uncomfortable. “Trusting people didn’t make the three of you happy.”

Just as Chris says, “It did at first,” Dustin slaps a hand over his mouth.

“No,” he says. “I’m not going to yell because that’ll just make things worse.” In a carefully modulated voice, he continues, saying “The reason we’re unhappy right now isn’t that we trust each other, it’s that we _don’t_. How did you miss that, Mark?”

“Wait,” Eduardo cuts in, “Does anyone in this room really trust anyone else?”

In response to Eduardo’s question, there’s an outbreak of muttering. Chris hears himself whisper “Eduardo would probably leave if things got too tough and Dustin swears he’d choose me over Mark but he probably would have said that to Eduardo and Mark is _Mark_.”

Louder, he says, “I don’t.” In a semi-conscious attempt to seem less pathetic, he follows it with “But I trust other people, just not the three of you.”

Eduardo answers his own question before Dustin has a chance. “I used to trust people but it’s really hard after your best friend completely screws you over.”

Mark looks—he looks a lot of things; the first word that Chris mumbles is “affronted,” but that just doesn’t quite seem to cover it. “It’s not like I started it or anything,” he says, at a volume entirely too close to yelling.

“You made it _personal_ ,” Eduardo snaps.

Chris looks across the coffee table at Dustin and whispers “Do you think we should leave?”

Dustin meets his eyes and answers, “I really don’t think so. I’m afraid they would kill each other if we did.”

 

\----------

 

Mark stares blankly at Eduardo, his thoughts completely jumbled to the point where he cannot even form words _involuntarily_.

Eduardo continues speaking, which is good, because the silence is beginning to overwhelm Mark, and he doesn’t want to start rambling inanely about how he doesn’t know what to say. The words give him something to focus on.

“Do you even understand why diluting my shares was different than freezing the account, Mark? Do you get that I was trying to get your attention because you weren’t letting me do my job, and you retaliated by humiliating me?” He makes a noise of exasperation, and Mark feels something akin to rage building in his stomach.

He starts to speak, but Eduardo’s words cover his, and Mark lets them trail into a whisper of “You could have humiliated me even worse.”

“I wanted to help you then,” Eduardo continues. “I wanted to help you with Facebook and I wanted to help you with everything, but you wouldn’t let me. And now I want to work things out so that I can stop announcing every goddamn thing I think, because it’s annoying and it’s _embarrassing_ and I kind of fucking hate it.”

“I hate it too,” Mark says, just barely audible, and Eduardo gapes at him. “That’s common ground. Maybe we should start there. It’s something we’re not fighting about.”

“Why did you do it?” Eduardo asks suddenly, and then claps a hand over his mouth. “Oh god, I didn’t mean to blurt that out, because that’s definitely _not_ common ground and it’ll just make things worse.”

Mark feels himself beginning to answer before Eduardo has even finished his retraction. “I did it because you were in New York and you weren’t listening and you endangered _everything_. But why did you do it?” He pauses for a moment. “Freezing the account, I mean.”

Eduardo hesitates, mouthing something silently to himself before he answers. In the silence, Mark hears Dustin stage-whisper to Chris, “They’re not killing each other, look!” and Chris snickers softly in reply, because he always thinks Dustin is funny (even when he isn’t).

“You were leaving me behind and I got scared,” Eduardo says, hesitantly. “At least, I think that’s why. I mostly just wanted your attention. Sean was there and you weren’t listening to me and you weren’t explaining things and I just wanted to help you and protect you.”

“Oh,” Mark says. “I didn’t know that.” The words feel slightly empty, like maybe he _should_ have known, and then more come out of his mouth. “Should I have realized that?”

“Probably,” Eduardo says. “I think I thought you knew. But I shouldn’t have frozen the account, so maybe we’re kind of even?”

Mark’s brain, suddenly and inexplicably, takes a complete detour into his memories from Harvard—from Kirkland, mostly. “You used to sit on my bed and study while I was coding,” he says.

“Yeah,” Eduardo says.

“You did it all the time,” Mark continues, the words slow with realization.

“We all did that to each other,” he hears Chris say, too quiet to really be a part of their conversation. It’s a little weird that Chris and Dustin are listening to him talk to Eduardo, he thinks.

“It feels kind of appropriate,” Dustin says, and Mark remembers that his thoughts still aren’t just his.

“What?” he asks.

It’s Chris who replies. “We always kind of watched you two at Harvard, the way you two would dance around each other and never manage to be on exactly the same wavelength. You would keep missing each other by moments. It was like a Shakespearean tragedy.”

He blushes as soon as he’s done speaking, and mumbles something that Mark doesn’t catch, because he’s too busy monologuing under his breath, searching through all the moments in his memory where he watched Eduardo and Eduardo wasn’t watching him.

“Don’t you two get it?” Dustin says. “It was the fucking stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. You were so clearly in love with each other and neither of you could get your shit together enough to actually do anything about it.”

Mark can feel Eduardo staring at him, eyes intense and full of emotions he’s never really been able to parse, but the words Eduardo says aren’t meant for him. “That’s rich, coming from you,” he snaps at Dustin.

“What are you talking about?” Mark asks, but everyone ignores him.

“That’s not the same,” Dustin protests, his voice wavering a little. “We were never …”

The look on Chris’s face is completely unreadable to Mark, some strange and perplexing combination of emotions he’s never before witnessed on his friend. “We were never tragic,” he says softly. “Dustin and me, we’ve been a lot of things, but we were never a tragedy.”

For all that Chris’s expression was unreadable, the one Dustin has on his face when he turns to Chris is a completely open book. Mark hasn’t spent a lot of his life paying attention to what the looks on people’s faces meant (there were always more important things), but he knows pure, unadulterated _love_ when he sees it.

And so, apparently, does Chris, because he takes that opportunity to practically launch himself across the coffee table and fling himself at Dustin, and then they’re kissing, and Mark is distinctly uncomfortable to still be watching them.

Mark turns to Eduardo, who is watching them kiss but also blushing. “Do you think they have a shot at actually being happy?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Eduardo answers carefully. “I think they do.”

“Do you think we ever would have?” Mark continues, before he can cover his mouth or bury his face in the couch cushions or _just die_.

Eduardo just stares at him for a moment, before replying. “I don’t know.” The words are painfully honest, and Mark’s not really sure what to do with them.

“I kind of like to think so,” Mark adds. “It’s—comforting, somehow. To think that it wasn’t completely hopeless.”

He pretends not to notice that Eduardo’s eyes are glistening a little. “But then that means we just screwed it up ourselves.”

“Yeah,” Mark says. “That part kinda sucks.”

“It kind of sucks no matter how you look at it,” Eduardo points out.

“That’s true.” He twists his mouth, and wishes in vain that he weren’t about to say his next thought; he feels it forming and already wants to stunt its grown but can’t. “I really fucked up royally, didn’t I?”

“Yep,” Eduardo says, entirely too confident and succinct for Mark’s comfort. “But maybe we could just—try again?”

The feeling that hits Mark in the gut is entirely to sweeping to be covered by something like “relief,” but he doesn’t think there’s any other word that comes as close. He stares at Eduardo, trying to force his reeling thoughts and gaping mouth into something resembling articulacy, however embarrassing the words that escape him might be. “I— _yes_ ,” he finally says. “I’d like that.”

It feels like the right thing to do when he extends his hand towards Eduardo.

It feels even righter when Eduardo ignores the hand completely to wrap his arms around Mark and buries his face in his shoulder.

 

\----------

 

Chris cannot begin to process the look on Dustin’s face. He’s gaping slightly, he can feel it, but there’s absolutely no sound coming out of it—which is surprising, given the number of fragmented, half-formed thoughts running through his mind.

“Dustin,” he mouths.

And then it’s like everything he hasn’t been able to understand for the last _years_ of his life suddenly clicks into place. “Shit,” he whispers, “Shit. Everything makes sense now.”

He wants to do everything, and say everything, and more than anything he just wants to kiss Dustin. His mouth is moving, forming those words almost soundlessly, and he can feel Dustin’s eyes on him.

“I want to kiss you,” Chris says, too softly for any of the others to hear, and then he pulls himself up and over to Dustin to do just that. “I don’t really understand it,” he murmurs into the kiss, the words incomprehensible to anyone but him, “But I do get that we need to work things out. I don’t want to try and be happy without you, because I know I could just leave and move to New York or something and make a new life, but I’d rather be here with you and able to trust you again and—”

And the the forcefulness of Dustin’s lips against his increases, and he’s too busy kissing back for his lips to form words and even if he had, they would just have been swallowed up by Dustin and Chris—is surprisingly okay with that.

He’s half-settled in Dustin’s lap, his hands wound around the back of Dustin’s neck and tangling in his hair, and they’re just kissing. They’ve done it before—they did it right where Mark and Eduardo are talking now, Chris can hear them vaguely but isn’t really listening—he’s calmer now, somehow, and he feels an almost overwhelming sense of _not-questioning_ about the whole thing.

Dustin’s hands are pressing into his back and dragging them closer together, and he says, though Chris feels the words more than he hears them, “What does this mean?”

Pulling back as little as possible, Chris says, “It means that not trusting you now doesn’t mean I’ll never trust you again.”

“I can work with that,” Dustin says, grinning a lot. “The trust thing will come with time, right?”

“Yeah,” Chris replies, and then adds, “I want to kiss you again.”

“You definitely should,” Dustin says, and Chris does so.

It’s not long—like, it’s probably less than a minute—before Dustin is pulling him even closer and his wanding hands are under Chris’s shirt, which is definitely nice and also definitely something Chris could get used to. Letting himself be okay with everything is strange and new (mostly in a good way), and he murmurs about it into Dustin’s neck as he kisses down towards his shoulder.

“You know,” Dustin says in return, the words only about halfway articulated through kisses, “There are absolutely no circumstances under which I would ever choose Mark over you. Ever.”

“I think I believe you,” Chris says, and presses his lips to Dustin’s again briefly. “I _want_ to believe you.”

Dustin tries to reply with something that was probably heartfelt and sincere, but all Chris hears is “Mmmmph,” because he’s really not interested in _not_ kissing Dustin for any longer than he has to.

And then Dustin is curling his hands against Chris’s back and Chris is squirming a little in his lap and the room feels entirely too warm.

“I want to take your shirt off,” he whispers against Dustin’s lips, and is promptly astounded at the speed with which Dustin pulls away to do so and is back kissing him.

“Fuck,” he says after a lingering kiss. “Mark and Eduardo are still sitting on the couch. I don’t think they’re watching but they could definitely see us if they wanted to.”

Chris cranes his neck to look at them, staring for a moment at them wrapped in each other’s arms on the sofa—it’s oddly intimate, he whispers to himself, and definitely both touching and a huge shift in their relationship. Neither of them looks towards him and Dustin, but Chris finds himself wondering, well, _what if they did_?

Of course, because things are what they are, he whispers the question aloud, _of course_ , because his luck is what it is, Dustin hears him.

“I wouldn’t mind so much,” he says, and Chris watches his eyes go a little wide. “Oh god,” he adds, “I didn’t want to say that.”

But instead of being horrified—and he knows he should be horrified, or at least mildly disturbed—Chris whispers, “Yeah, no, I understand,” and Dustin swallows visibly and pulls him in for another kiss. Chris leans into it, licking at Dustin’s lips and running a hand down his now-bare chest.

“Should we go somewhere else?” Chris asks as Dustin fumbles to take his shirt off, fingernails scraping against his nipple and making him gasp.

“Not unless you really want do,” Dustin replies, his voice thick. “I kind of like it here. The idea that Mark and Wardo could watch is kinda hot,” he continues, and Chris shudders a little against him.

“It really is,” he blurts.

“If they really don’t want to see us,” Dustin says, “They can leave.”

But when Chris twists his head around to look at Mark and Eduardo, they aren’t hugging anymore. Instead, they’re both watching intently, Mark’s mouth open slightly, and Eduardo mouthing something that Chris can’t quite make out but that looks disturbingly like “That’s really hot.”

 

\----------

 

When Mark finally pries himself—albeit somewhat reluctantly—out of Eduardo’s arms, the first thing he notices is that Dustin has somehow lost his shirt and is in the process of removing Chris’s.

“Oh,” he feels himself say, “that’s—”

But he’s not quite sure what it is, and the sentence trails off accordingly.

And then Chris shudders a little in Dustin’s lap and he hears Eduardo whisper “God, that’s really hot.”

Mark nods to himself, saying “Yeah, that’s what it is.” He glances over at Eduardo, who’s staring intently at Chris and Dustin, and then turns his eyes back to them as well—just in time for Chris to turn around and meet his eyes.

The sensation that runs through him isn’t unlike having an ice cube dropped down the back of his shirt, and he feels his skin tighten. He can’t pull his eyes away from Chris’s, which are wide and dark, and looking at him steadily. Swallowing involuntarily, he watches as Dustin finally gets Chris’s shirt all the way off and lets it fall to the floor.

When Dustin runs a hand up Chris’s bare back, fingers curved in to scrape his nails lightly, Chris’s head whips around to kiss him—hard.

They’re almost writhing, now, arms everywhere and Chris squirming down into Dustin’s lap in a way that makes it clear he’s searching for friction. Mark knows intellectually that he’s whispering himself, but he’s starting to suspect that the words are leaving his mouth more as inarticulate groans and half-finished phrases than as complete thoughts.

And then, all at once, Chris turns back around to look at Mark, and Dustin gets his hand into Chris’s pants. Mark watches Chris’s eyes go wide, and feels his mouth go a little slack as Chris groans, and then— _dear god_ , says, “Mark, come here.”

He watches Dustin nip at Chris’s collarbone, eliciting a soft whimper, and remembers kissing Chris. “Okay,” he hears himself whisper. “I think I want to do this.”

Squaring his shoulders a little, Mark stands up from the couch and walks the few steps to be able to drop to his knees next to Chris. For a moment, they watch each other, and then Chris says, surprisingly confident, “I want to kiss you again.”

Mark, immediately and without hesitation, which surprises him a bit, wraps a hand around the back of Chris’s neck and kisses him, licking against his mouth. A hand curls into his hair and, when he opens his eyes briefly, he sees that it’s not Chris’s. Dustin has reached down to trail the fingers of one hand across Mark’s head and the other is still toying with the button of Chris’s jeans.

“Fuck,” he says, “I can’t even tell you how hot that is.”

From across the room, he hears a soft groan, and Dustin says, “Eduardo is watching.”

“We should fix that,” Chris says, untangling himself from Dustin and climbing out of the chair. Mark’s arm falls back to his side, and he feels oddly bereft.

His stomach feels slightly twisted as Chris crosses the room and drops onto the couch to kiss Eduardo, but he’s not entirely sure if it’s arousal or—jealousy? He doesn’t think he wants anyone other than him kissing Eduardo, but at the same time, Chris is clearly _really_ into it, curling a hand around Eduardo’s neck and pressing him back into the arm of the couch.

“I’m really turned on right now,” Mark says, so focused on Chris and Eduardo that it sounds almost distant.

“Me too,” he hears Dustin say from behind him; when Mark glances over his shoulder, he’s nodding absently and biting his lip. “Do you want to join in?” Dustin continues, turning beet red as soon as the words escape him.

“ _God_ yes,” Mark replies, standing up and moving towards Chris and Eduardo.

But once he’s standing next to the couch, looking down at them—Chris’s hand is buried in Eduardo’s hair and Eduardo’s arm is wrapped tight around Chris’s waist, his hand inching toward the waist of Chris’s pants—Mark feels strangely nervous. “I’m not sure what to do,” he says, moving his hands uselessly by his sides.

“You should suck someone off,” Dustin supplies, his voice low and tense. Immediately, he starts to mumble about how he shouldn’t have said it, but Mark feels his body shudder a little at the idea.

“I want to,” he whispers, his eyes still fixed on Chris and Eduardo. “I want to blow Eduardo.”

From underneath Chris, Mark hears a soft moan followed by a “God, _please_.” He lets himself sink down next to them, his eyes running across Chris’s bare chest, and he swallows hard. Staying on his knees, he watches as Chris climbs off Eduardo and begins to undress him. It’s oddly hypnotic, watching someone else remove Eduardo’s clothes, Mark thinks, and then adds wryly that he’s assuming that “hypnotic” is synonymous with “erotic.”

He’s probably whispering about that, he knows, but he’s too distracted by the scene playing out in front of him—and by his own arousal—to really care.

Behind him, he feels a warm presence and he realizes it’s Dustin kneeling, his bare chest touching the back of Mark’s t-shirt. And then Dustin’s hands are under the bottom of his shirt, trailing lightly across his back and he feels himself melt a little. Mark lets his head fall back onto Dustin’s shoulder as Dustin grabs at his shirt and tries to peel it over his head. It doesn’t exactly work, at least not until Mark lifts his head back up, but when Dustin throws the shirt off—somewhere, and begins pressing kisses to the top of Mark’s spine, he decides it was worthwhile.

A hand touches Mark’s cheek, and it makes him jolt out of a daze of muttered comments about how much he likes what Dustin’s doing and how nice it would be if the touching were a little less delicate because he’s really fucking turned on, okay. Looking up a little, he sees Eduardo watching him.

He sees Eduardo watching him and _being naked_.

“Holy shit,” Mark says, “You’re naked.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo answers, his eyes trailing across Mark. “You’re still wearing pants.”

“Oh, uh, I guess I am,” Mark says, and then because he has no fucking choice in the matter, he continues, “But I can still suck you off with my pants on.”

The noise Eduardo makes is somewhere between a curse and a groan, Mark can’t really say which, in part because he’s distracted by Dustin saying, “True, but I can’t fuck you with your pants on.”

“Shit,” Mark hears Chris say, “I really want to watch that.”

To his vague surprise, Mark isn’t actually saying anything out loud. His brain is kind of stuck somewhere between _I’m going to give Eduardo a blowjob_ and _Dustin wants to fuck me_. He can feel his mouth gaping a little, though.

(“You look like a fish,” Eduardo says.)

“I’m going to go get a condom,” Dustin says. “Does anyone else need—”

“No,” Eduardo says.

Mark groans a little in the back of his throat, and reaches forward to run a hand up Eduardo’s thigh. Eduardo’s eyes flutter shut for a moment, and then he starts to say, “God, Mark, that’s really—” but then Mark palms his cock and the words turn into a hissed exhale as Eduardo’s hips stutter forward a little.

“I really want,” Mark begins to say, but he would kind of like to pretend that he has some sense of dignity left, so he just leans forward and licks at the head of Eduardo’s cock.

Everything goes kind of still for a moment; Eduardo tenses on the couch, and Mark stills with his face against Eduardo’s thigh, and Chris exhales audibly. Then Eduardo’s hand is resting against the back of Mark’s head and he inches forward again, whispering that he might as well do this properly before he takes Eduardo into his mouth and sucks _hard_ , just once.

Eduardo fucking _whimpers_ , which Mark was definitely not expecting but is also definitely okay with. He keeps at it, obviously, because the noise is one of the hottest things he’s ever heard and hearing again has suddenly become a very high priority.

And then from above him he hears a wet smacking that he thinks is Chris and Eduardo kissing again. Pulling back a little, he looks up through his eyelashes to see Eduardo half turned toward Chris, and the two of them kissing messily.

It’s kind of disgustingly hot, and Mark feels the words of that thought trying to escape his mouth despite it being rather—full.

“Chris,” Eduardo moans softly. Something Mark is pretty sure is jealousy courses through him suddenly, and he returns to swallowing as much of Eduardo down as he can, eyes closed to concentrate and determined to be the center of his focus again.

Not entirely unsurprisingly, it works. Soon, Eduardo is moaning Mark’s name into Chris’s mouth and Mark—despite having barely been touched—is so fucking hard he can barely see straight. He works Eduardo over slowly, enjoying the tortured noises he makes and the way that Chris is pinning him a little by the hips so that he won’t push himself too forcefully into Mark’s mouth.

From above him, he can ear the soft but steady narrative Eduardo is giving; “Shit, yes, Mark,” and “Your mouth is so hot,” and “I used to fantasize about you doing this all the time.”

The last is especially unhelpful for his self-control.

Mark is already making soft wanting noises around Eduardo’s dick (that would probably be words if his brain and his throat were working properly) when he feels a warm hand touch his back lightly, then trail around to undo his pants, brushing achingly lightly across his cock.

“Dustin,” Mark thinks, but the name comes out more like a guttural groan that makes Eduardo shudder and Dustin bite at the junction of his neck and shoulder. He’s not exactly sure what Eduardo and Chris are doing because he’s pretty sure that if he opened his eyes, he would lose all self-control because Chris keeps saying things like “Oh god, yes, Eduardo, like that,” and every time he does, Mack’s cock twitches a little. Actually seeing it would probably ruin him, he decides.

With absolutely no warning _whatsoever_ , a finger presses against his ass, slick and hot but also tentative. Mark almost wishes that Eduardo’s dick weren’t in his mouth, so that the things he’s thinking about how much he wants Dustin to fuck him would come out as words, not as incomprehensible groans. He settles for wriggling towards the finger, trying not to whimper when Dustin starts to slide it inside him.

It becomes a lost cause when he notices the stream of things that Dustin is muttering into his ear.

“Shit,” Mark hears him say. “Shit, are you watching Chris and Eduardo? I can’t stop; it’s so fucking hot. I don’t even know why I like it, because I definitely want Chris all to myself, but they just kissing and—Jesus, Mark—they’re both really into it.” There’s a lull in Dustin’s speech as he kisses down Mark’s neck, and then the words start up again. “Until I saw you in the kitchen right after you and Eduardo got each other off or whatever it was you did, I’d never even thought about you like this. But after that, I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

“Jesus,” he tries to whisper, because that’s about all he can think. Dustin’s gone back to narrating about how Chris and Eduardo are still kissing and how Eduardo’s hand is in Chris’s pants and Chris keeps pushing into it. Mark can almost picture it, at least until Dustin slips the finger he’d been teasing with into him, and then he’s understandably distracted, his body trying fruitlessly to form words despite his mouth being—obstructed, and he tries to focus on not doing something untoward like biting Eduardo.

His mouth goes completely slack when Dustin pulls his finger out and pushes back in with two, but his hips move into it involuntarily. Above him, he hears Chris say “Oh my god, Dustin, I wish you were doing that to me,” which is really fucking distracting, to the point that Mark has to actively distract himself from anything happening because he doesn’t want to be the first one to come.

Dustin is still talking, a steady commentary on what he’s feeling, how much he wishes he could be kissing Chris and still have his fingers in Mark’s ass, how much it’s turning him on to watch Eduardo jerk Chris off—and while he’s doing that, he’s stretching Mark open, three fingers now, Mark’s not sure when that happened.

Mark tries not to think too much about what Dustin’s doing—or saying, for that matter—and focuses on making Eduardo come as quickly as possible, because he’s pretty sure that Dustin is going to start fucking him properly soon and he doesn’t think he can keep from biting or gagging or choking or something equally unsexy. He sucks and swallows around Eduardo, humming when Dustin crooks his fingers, and he starts moving his hand from where it’s been gripping Chris’s towards Eduardo’s dick.

Mark’s hand is trailing up Eduardo’s thigh when he feels it go tense, and then Eduardo’s words turn, briefly, almost coherent. “Shit, Mark, I’m about to—” and then the words end, though he doesn’t know why until Dustin says, “Oh god, that’s the hottest kiss I think I’ve ever seen.”

And then Eduardo keens a little and comes down Mark’s throat, and Dustin chooses that exact moment to push into Mark—not fingers this time, too thick and solid.

“Shit,” Chris says, the word tense and drawn out.

“Yeah,” Dustin agrees, sounding strained—kind of how Mark feels, trying desperately to last more than a few seconds but Eduardo’s in front of him looking completely debauched and Chris’s mouth is hanging open slightly, moving but not quite enough for him to make out the words.

“I don’t think I can last very long,” Dustin and Mark both say, almost simultaneously, and Dustin follows it up by rolling his hips cautiously.

The words that Mark had been managing to keep under his breath suddenly turn loud, a stream of swearing and groans and incredibly inarticulate descriptions of how much he likes seeing Eduardo ravished and dazed. The more Dustin shifts behind him, testing his angles and tugging at Mark’s hips, the more his words run together, until the it’s finally just right and a groan of “Fuck, Dustin” turns into more of a drawn-out “Nnnnnnn” sound that Mark would be a lot more embarrassed about if Chris weren’t running a thumb along his chin, swiping at the drops of come clinging to it and then sucking them into his mouth.

Behind him, Dustin curses and his hips jerk forward, almost painfully. Mark feels his eyes roll back a little as he mutters about how he didn’t think that would turn him on but apparently it really, _really_ does. He’s trying to watch Chris, who now seems to be doing most of the work, fucking himself into Eduardo’s fist.

“Keep doing that,” Eduardo whispers to Chris, but his eyes are trained on Mark’s leaking dick.

Everything’s going kind of fuzzy, with Dustin slamming into him and Chris whimpering on the couch and Eduardo just watching like he can’t even comprehend everything going on around him.

But then Eduardo starts to move and suddenly Mark’s completely focused on him, whispering almost breathlessly, though he’s not entirely sure what the words escaping him mean. He keeps working Chris over (though Mark is starting to think that’s not going to take much longer, because Chris’s eyes are rolling back a little and he’s tensing against Eduardo’s arm) and leans down to kiss Mark. And Mark—Mark just curls up into it, sealing his mouth against Eduardo’s, unable to understand his emotions even though, for once, he kind of wants to.

“Oh god,” he hears Chris say, the words slurred together and bitten out. Mark’s pretty sure he just came—which is kind of mind-numbingly hot, the mental image of him arching into Eduardo and then slumping against him, worn out and maybe a little overwhelemed—but if he were to open his eyes, he’d just see Eduardo’s cheeks, so he’s not entirely sure.

Completely unexpectedly, Mark feels a hand brush against his dick. The hand is warm and sticky which should be a _hell_ of a lot grosser than it is and it has to be Eduardo’s; it’s tugging at Mark just a little too loosely for him to actually _come_. He’s whining, too far gone to focus on anything but the burning in his stomach and how much he both wants this to end now because it’s all too much and never end because it’s amazing.

Eduardo’s hand tightens around him and he shudders into it, his hips twitching forward before he realizes what’s happening. “Jesus, Mark,” Dustin says into his ear, “I don’t—” and then Mark makes a noise he’s not going to analyze because it would probably be embarrassing and spills onto Eduardo’s hand.

Everything’s kind of a haze for a few minutes after that. Dustin probably came—he’s certainly no longer driving into Mark; instead, he’s a little slumped against his back. “ _Jesus_ ,” Mark hears him whisper, “That was probably the best sex I’ve ever had.”

“Yeah,” Mark says, and he hears Chris and Eduardo murmur their own assents from the couch.

Mark notices, because he hadn’t before, that Eduardo has pulled away from him and curled up on the couch a little bit, his mouth completely unmoving, probably for the first time since this stupid word vomit started. “I wish you were still kissing me,” he says, too loud into the exhausted silence of the room.

Before he even has time to voice his mortification over the outburst, his head tips forward onto Eduardo’s knee and he falls asleep, curled up on the carpet.

 

\----------

 

When Chris wakes up, he has a _terrible_ crick in his neck and his left leg is cramping underneath him.

"Ow," he says—except when he raises a hand to his mouth, it's closed. Chris frowns a little, temporarily nonplussed by the occurrence.

Not that he's really _sad_ to be able to keep his thoughts to himself. It's nice, to be able to think without having to control his voice so as not to disturb anyone else. Because yeah, Eduardo's asleep next to him, curled in on himself, and Mark's sitting on the floor, his head pitched forward into Eduardo's knees.

And behind him, lying on his side, awake and running his fingers lightly around the ankle of Chris's dangling leg, is Dustin.

He looks up, meeting Chris's eyes. "Hey," he says.

Chris feels himself smile. "Hi," he answers. It feels almost strange, when he has to make an effort to get the next words past his lips, but he does it. “What in the name of God did we do?”

Dustin pushes himself up halfway, and looks over at Mark, still curled against Eduardo’s legs, and seems to be at a loss for words. It feels new again, to look at Dustin and not know what’s going through his head, but it’s not an entirely unpleasant change.

When he opens his mouth briefly, Dustin’s eyes are still trained on Mark. No words escape, though, and he shuts it again before turning his gaze back towards Chris. Twisting his mouth wryly, he says, “Unless I’m losing my mind, it was a foursome.”

“I don’t think you are,” Chris replies, still a little hoarse from sleep. “I’m also not entirely sure how I feel about that.”

Dustin laughs lightly. “I completely understand,” he says, pushing up from the floor a little gingerly. “Should we move Mark, do you think?”

Mark, Chris notes as he looks over, is not just resting against Eduardo’s knees; one of Eduardo’s hands is curled loosely in his hair and the other is resting on the sofa, with Mark’s only inches from it. It’s painfully intimate, given that they weren’t speaking a few days earlier, but Chris can’t help noticing that it looks, well, just kind of painful as well.

Only, the thing is … “Maybe if we leave them, they’ll actually talk to each other after they wake up,” he says. “Before I—jumped you—it seemed like they were actually making progress.”

Dustin flushes a little at his words and it is, without a doubt, the most charming thing Chris has ever seen. He smiles, both unwilling and unable to help himself, and adds, “Do you want to go somewhere and, I don’t know, talk?”

“Yeah,” Dustin answers, quick and enthusiastic. “Yeah, definitely.”

Before he stands, Chris reaches down so that he can help pull Dustin to his feet; the touch is somehow both comforting and thrilling. Once he’s upright, Dustin winds an arm around Chris’s waist and pulls him toward the kitchen. Chris finds himself relaxing into it, and he rests his head briefly against Dustin’s shoulder.

“Do you want coffee or something?” Dustin asks him once they get there, shuffling nervously in the middle of the room.

“I’m good,” Chris answers, sitting down, his eyes fixed on the table.

Dustin settles into the chair and doesn’t make eye contact for what feels like several minutes. “I,” he mumbles, trailing off awkwardly.

“Yeah,” Chris asks, genuinely curious (because it’s _Dustin_ and he’s never this uncomfortable and Chris is more than a little in love with him anyway).

“I love you,” Dustin says, the words running together, too fast to be distinct.

“You’ve said that before,” Chris says, but he can feel himself smiling; his heart feels a little too big for his chest.

Dustin blushes a little. “I just wanted to say it when you knew I had a choice. Because I want you to know and I want to say it to you and it feels like that matters, I guess.”

If Chris thought he was uncomfortably happy before, he’s not sure what he’s feeling now. He’s smiling broadly at Dustin, isn’t sure he could stop if he tried. “It does matter,” he says. “I’m—” he begins, but he’s not sure what he wants to say. He could give away everything, or nothing, or something in between.

But Dustin is looking at him, his eyes hopeful and trusting and maybe baring his soul a little wouldn’t be so bad. “I love you too,” Chris says, forcing the words past his lips (still such a strange feeling) before he can chicken out.

The smile on Dustin’s face, beginning before the words have even fully left Chris’s lips, is so wide it almost hurts to look at him. Completely unwilling to resist the temptation, Chris leans forward just enough to kiss him softly. They’re both smiling into the kiss, just a lingering press of lips, no tongues or teeth, and it’s kind of wonderful. Before he pulls away, he runs his hand up the side of Dustin’s neck and threads his fingers through the hair at his nape.

“We can do this,” he says, resting his forehead against Dustin’s.

“I’m game,” Dustin replies, a smile quirking his lips.

Chris leans in again, letting his lips ghost over Dustin’s before he draws back a little and says, “I really need to go make a phone call. It won’t take long but—not making it would be dishonest.”

“The guy you were seeing?” Dustin asks, biting his lip. “I—should we not have done— _that_ —last night?”

“It’s fine,” Chris says, running his thumb down the edge of Dustin’s cheek. “But I should—”

“Yeah, you do that,” Dustin answers, cutting him off. “I’ll be here.”

“You better be,” Chris says, forcing himself to resist the temptation to kiss Dustin one last time before he slips out the back door.

 

\----------

 

The moment Mark is awake enough to process pain, he starts swearing. His neck is so stiff he can barely move it, and he’s really disgustingly sticky kind of _everywhere_. “This is disgusting,” he hears himself grumble.

Under his head, which he still hasn’t fully raised, Eduardo’s knees twitch a little.

Mark jerks away, his neck cracking almost painfully, and looks up at Eduardo. His eyes are opening a little and he’s squinting down at Mark, visibly confused. “Why are you asleep on my legs?” he asks.

“Uh,” Mark begins, hoarse, and then waits for the rest of his jumbled thoughts to spill out of his mouth.

They don’t.

Well, he thinks (and doesn’t say), that’s new.

“I think we had sex,” Mark says, the words a lot harder to force out than they would have been yesterday. “Like, you and me and Chris and Dustin.” He glances down, noting that he’s not exactly wearing pants, which is really kind of mortifying, but he tries to ignore that in favor of dealing with the even more embarrassing fact that he’s pretty sure he had group sex.

Mostly he kind of wants to hide away, but there’s a nagging voice in the back of his head (why does that voice always sound like Chris?) telling him that it would undo everything he and Eduardo had already accomplished.

“Oh god,” Eduardo says. Mark watches his eyes trace across their disheveled bodies and tries to arrange himself in a vaguely modest way, despite how futile he knows the attempt is. “We,” Eduardo begins, but instead of finishing the sentence he just blushes furiously and tries to avoid Mark’s eyes.

“It doesn’t have to be that big a deal,” Mark says, because it feels—maybe absurdly—like what he ought to say, even though he’s pretty fucking sure that having sex with Eduardo is the biggest deal of anything he’s done in his life (with the obvious exception of facebook, because it’s _facebook_ and thus on an entirely different plane of existence).

“Mark,” Eduardo says, his voice stubbornly flat. “Even you aren’t oblivious enough to believe that.”

Before he can help himself, Mark smiles.

“We should probably talk—again, I guess.” He’s not really wild about the idea, but that nagging voice is still telling him that it needs to happen.

“Yeah,” Eduardo says. “You should probably, uh, shower first. And put on pants.”

Mark nods. “I’m gonna go do that,” he says.

On his way up to the shower, he hears the back door open and then click shut again. From inside the kitchen, a quiet voice—probably Chris—says, “So that’s all dealt with,” and then Mark hears a noise that sounds disturbingly like smacking. Belatedly, he realizes that it’s probably Chris and Dustin making out. Again. Resisting the temptation to roll his eyes, mostly because he’d—well, he thinks he’d kind of like to be making out with Eduardo soon, Mark heads upstairs to take a shower and find cleanish clothes.

While he showers, he tries to process things a little bit, but he honestly doesn’t manage to make sense of much that’s happened in the past few days. He keeps getting hung up on details like what exactly he feels for Eduardo—which, honestly, is probably less of a detail and more of _the whole point of everything_. Chris and Dustin seem to have themselves sorted, he knows, but he doesn’t—he’s never—

He’s never been able to _talk_ to Eduardo properly.

That, well. That kind makes everything else fall into place.

Mark scrubs distractedly at his skin, trying to take a step back from the last couple days and examine what happened from a different angle.

It was miserable and confusing and he said so much more than he wanted to about so many different things, but he and Eduardo actually communicated. Like, in the way that Chris is always yelling at him to communicate, as in they (sort of) effectively shared their emotions and understood what the other was saying.

If nothing else, it was an improvement from glaring at each other across crowded rooms and deposition tables.

But with that figured out, Mark realizes he’s not left with many thoughts besides examining why it matters so much that he be able to communicate, why it matters so much that he wants to kiss Eduardo or—and god, what a stupid thing to want—that he wants to make Eduardo smile. After everything, he doesn’t think he’s _angry_ anymore, and he doesn’t think Eduardo is either.

That could be a nice start.

He forces himself to turn off the water and drags himself out of the shower. After he’s found some clothes—Dustin’s, unfortunately—that don’t seem completely filthy, he heads back downstairs.

Eduardo is still sitting on the couch, but he’s found a book and is reading intently, his eyes moving quickly across the pages. Mark watches him for a moment, enjoying the quasi-familiarity of the whole scene.

“Hi,” he says finally.

“Oh, hi,” Eduardo replies, looking up from his book just as Mark drops onto the sofa next to him. “Should we,” he begins, biting his lip—which is not at all attractive, Mark tells himself, hoping that if he thinks it vehemently enough, it’ll become true—“Should we talk?”

“I think so,” Mark says.

“Okay,” Eduardo begins, thankfully taking the initiative on this one. “We kind of—yeah,” here he blushes, then continues. “Last night we did some stuff and I—don’t really know which part of it to focus on.”

“Um.” Mark’s not entirely sure what part he should be focusing on, either. The group sex aspect was definitely—it was definitely something, though he doesn’t quite know what. But when he thinks about Chris and the stupid crush he had in college, or about Dustin, or about Chris-and-Dustin, it’s kind of something he’s not sure he ever wants to do again. Because Chris and Dustin are so—and then he and Eduardo—

It bothers him that none of his thoughts are really complete, he makes himself say _something_ anyway. “I think that we shouldn’t focus on the stuff with all four of us,” he says, lingering uncertainty turning the words almost into a question.

Eduardo’s lips quirk a little. “What do the two of us want to do next, then?”

Mark’s stomach flops a little, and a few ideas that are markedly more graphic than he’s entirely comfortable with jump into his mind.

“Well, we could go out to dinner sometime. Somewhere nice.” His voice doesn’t shake when he says it, but he does—suddenly and completely—understand what fear of rejection feels like.

And then Eduardo smiles at him, and it’s not an ironic quirk of his lips or a smirk or a sneer, it’s a smile like the ones he used to give Mark in college and, well, if Mark thought his heart had flopped before, he didn’t know anything.

“That sounds fun,” Eduardo says, but Mark’s hardly listening. The smile was enough of an answer.

(Chris would be proud of him for understanding body language, he thinks.)

And then, because he’s pretty sure that it’s okay, he leans forward to kiss Eduardo softly. He feels Eduardo smile against his lips before kissing him back and—everything just feels pretty okay.

No, Mark corrects himself, as he reaches up to pull Eduardo a little closer, it’s a hell of a lot more than just pretty okay.

It’s kind of amazing.


End file.
